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Posted on 08/27/2014 12:47:08 PM PDT by Kaslin
For more than 24-hours, CNN has been regularly playing a clip of audio which purports to reveal the exact moment when 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darren Wilson. Each time it was played, the CNN anchors and hosts noted that the sound could not be independently verified by the network, but it was just too good to wait to play it for viewers.
CNN’s ratings have been phenomenal since the violence in Ferguson erupted, and the network has displayed a tendency in the past to latch onto any development no matter how dubious that keeps a ratings-grabbing story alive. The suspect audio supposedly of the moment when police shot and killed Brown may be another of these moments.
On Wednesday morning, CNN’s Michaela Pereira invited two former law enforcement officials on the program to discuss the authenticity of the tape.
“I’ve told your producers that for all I know this is one of Howard Stern’s punk people,” former LAPD officer David Klinger said. “It came out, what, two weeks after the event, and so I don’t have a high degree of confidence in it.”
“But, it could be real,” he added without much enthusiasm.
Klinger noted that his first inclination is “someone is trying to punk CNN.”
CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes seemed to share Klinger’s opinion. He left open the possibility that the audio, which to him sounded dubbed, may have been manipulated by CNN’s producers before it was aired. “My producer says that’s all we were given,” Pereira said.
“When I heard this yesterday, I thought the exact same thing: it’s a hoax,” Fuentes added.
He went on to note that, even if the tape is real, it supports the claims of both Brown and Wilson’s supporters and is not of much evidentiary value.
CNN guests tell CNN their Brown shooting audio may be a hoax
If this audio does prove to be a hoax, it is not an understandable mistake that anyone could have made – if only because everyone didn’t make it, just CNN. When a story that still commands significant audience attention runs out of facts to report, incidents like these are more likely to occur.
CNN’s coverage of the events in Ferguson has, for the most part, been both compelling and informative. The ratings the network has earned are deserved. However, if this audio does turn out to be inauthentic, it would be another opportunity for CNN to learn the lessons of their saturation coverage of the missing Malaysian passenger airliner; sacrificing credibility for ratings is never a good tradeoff.
I think it should be illegal for programs to profit off of news. Broadcasting news should be a public service. Congress should ban news programs from having commercials.
If Obama's DOJ deems it to be of evidentiary value, it'll definitely have evidentiary value, whether it does or not.
In the past, TV news was outside of the profits focused portion.
Voice analysis has shown that the voice on the tape belongs to Zaharie Shah, the pilot of MH370, lost in March on a flight from Malaysia to Beijing.
Got it.
practically everything else the media has said about mike brown was fake, why should this bother them?
Not because of any high principle: it was there to fill airtime - much cheaper to produce than other entertainment.
They look like such fools, how is this any different?
Maybe CNN found those NBC producers who blew up the car a few years back or the ones who produced the faked typed info for Rather.
Didn’t say the government, now did I?
The MSM creates “news” to generate profits. They worked up the crowds in Ferguson to increase their ratings to make more money.
If the liberals are so high and mighty, they should broadcast the news for free!
I was going to put a sarcasm tag in May original post, but didn’t because I wanted to see what type of response I’d get.
It was more than that, the news divisions felt they were a public service above profit, and much of a network’s public image was in it’s news division and news readers.
The more sound or video footage that can be found or produced for an incident is the direct driver of the airtime and evaluation of worth as a News Story.
Media News is therefore independent of real events or actual evaluation of the specifics.
The game changer was 60 Minutes, which showed that the news divisions could produce profitable programming.
But I’m not sure it really matters. Back before profits were introduced the news divisions at least tried (mostly) to present the appearance of unbiased professionalism.
Nowadays it’s all about what advances the narrative.
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